Democratic convention diary: a barnstorming stemwinder and a missing Clinton

Fact-checkers were overwhelmed and journalists struggled for hyperboles to describe Bill Clinton's speech, but what of Hillary?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in East Timor watching her husband, former President Bill Clinton, nominating President Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photograph: Nick Merrill/AFP/Getty Images

• The presidential candidates' main challenge, in the country at large, is persuading a largely uninterested electorate to pay attention in the first place – and a forthcoming book by Bob Woodward hardly bodes well for Barack Obama in this regard. In The Price of Politics, Woodward recounts the day when senior Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were scrambling to finalise the details of the stimulus bill. The president, ABC reports, phoned in to deliver a "high-minded message". He kept talking. And talking. And talking. Eventually, Pelosi "reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone", so the two could continue working as Obama lectured on. And that was within Obama's first few weeks as president; these days, presumably, she just lets him go straight to voicemail.

• Bill Clinton's Wednesday night convention speech, commentators almost universally agreed, was a triumph. Among the few disappointed voices was that of FactCheck.org, a non-partisan project set up to monitor both campaigns' truth levels. The Clinton speech was "a fact-checker's nightmare", their operatives reported, because he included so many "statistics and factual claims" – almost all of which "checked out". This feels like a watershed moment of sorts: is lying now so endemic in US politics that a speech not full of juicy untruths counts as a disappointment? Perhaps FactCheck should turn to the question, hotly disputed among pundits, of whether Clinton's performance was a "barn-raiser", a "barnstormer" or a "stemwinder". (Note to less accomplished speechmakers than Clinton, which means everybody: don't try to raise a barn and storm it simultaneously, for health and safety reasons.)

• And why wasn't Hillary Clinton in Charlotte to watch her husband? On the right, speculation was rampant. Was she "avoiding" the convention, as the Washington Examiner claimed? Did her trip to East Timor "forcefully [underline] her effort to distance herself from Obama's waning political fortunes", as the Daily Caller put it? Does she find Bill intolerable? Perhaps! Then again, the real reason just might have been the Hatch Act of 1939, which specifically outlaws the presence of secretaries of state at conventions, so that the nation's chief representative abroad remains non-political. Secretary Clinton watched Bill's speech on a computer in the Timorese ambassador's home, and in the State Department's official photo, she looks thrilled, not reluctant. Although, that said, there's what appears to be a stiff alcoholic drink within arm's reach, so maybe that helped.

• For several months, thanks to a public art project, walkers on a hiking trail near Glendale in California have come face to face with cardboard cutouts of Hollywood's western heroes: Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and Gene Autry. In the last few days, they've been encountering a new addition: cardboard Eastwood is now accompanied by a cardboard empty chair. Future historians will agree: yes, it was the era when we destroyed the environment. But we did internet memes really, really well.